The Lied-To Generation

You have heard of Gen-X, Gen-Y, the Millennium Generation, the Greatest Generation, and perhaps a few others. This article is for all of those who are part of what I would call The Lied-To Generation. It is hard to pinpoint when that began, because it varied from state to state and from school to school. But it most certainly includes nearly everyone born after 1975.

While there are many ways that people have always been lied to by the world they grew up in, none have been lied to as much as those born near the end of or after the twentieth century. Those of you who fall into that era have been lied to in regard to just about every significant aspect of life, and mostly by people who sincerely believed in what they said to you. So what you have been told may sound right to you. But what you may not know is that you are living in a world that is almost as bizarre as the Matrix. What’s more, the few people who are trying to tell you the truth have been so discredited by their own poor track record as well as by those who lie that you who have grown up in this world have almost no way to find your red pill.

Here is just a short list of some of the things you have been lied to about:

Character: In 1992 we had an unofficial national debate about whether character mattered in a leader, or whether a person’s personal character and his or her ability to lead were two different things. A hundred years ago, such a debate would have been unthinkable! Everyone knew that character was a an essential component of leadership. Without it you could not lead anything. To think otherwise you would have to be mentally unstable. And although there have always been people of questionable character in positions of leadership, everyone knew that it was an illegitimate role. Today the main qualification for becoming a leader seems to be either one’s own ruthlessness or good salesmanship, promising everyone whatever they want to hear. What no one will tell you is that putting people of poor character in positions of leadership is what causes nations to fail.

Education: You have been terribly misled in regard to your own education. Somehow you have been given a very strong impression that because you live in a technically advanced age that you know far more than your parents and grandparents. The truth is that the average college student today would fail even the most basic eighth-grade test given in 1900. Almost any teacher who has been teaching for more than 30 years knows that the whole system has been dumbed down several times to accommodate the poor attention span of your generation and the general unwillingness to learn. Fifty years ago, everyone knew that learning was more the responsibility of the student than the teacher. And they were expected to do what it took to learn the material. Today, everyone thinks that the teacher’s job is to dispense the answers to test questions so that students can all get A’s. High-school students can tell you all the personal details of the latest Idol star, but cannot find the United States on a globe or give you change back from your dollar. All the while that you are being told how smart you are, employers all over the country are scrambling to figure out how to prepare for the future, because there are fewer and fewer graduates with any useful knowledge or problem-solving skills. But no one is telling you the truth, that you have been given the absolute worst education since the dawn of public schooling.

History: By some strange failure of education, you have been led to believe that nothing matters if it happened before you were born. You do not even believe that there is such a thing as wisdom that can be passed down from one generation to the next. You have been told that you are the master of your own destiny, and that by virtue of your autonomy you can make all the decisions about life you need to make without the slightest regard for the lessons of those who have gone before. Nothing that happened to anyone else or any other country has the slightest implications for what you might do or not do, or what things you might think are important. What no one will tell you is that by cutting loose the cords of history and the lessons from the last three thousand years of history, you have about a 100% chance of destroying Western civilization. I know that sounds ridiculous to you, because you have such an incredible belief in your own power, that whatever you want to be true will be true. But that is all part of the massive Matrix that you have been taught to believe, none of which has any bearing on reality. The truth is that our civilization is already in a steep decline, rapidly deteriorating and ejecting all means of recovery as fast as it can. No one over thirty will tell you this, because: (1) they are hiding out, hoping they will die before the end comes; or (2) they know you won’t believe them anyway; or (3) they do not want you to know they don’t know what they are doing; or (4) they are just as misinformed as you are. The truth is that history teaches us what works and what does not, what kinds of mistakes lead to terrible losses, and what kinds of values are needed to keep society intact.

Moral Knowledge: You have been told over and over that morality is a social construct or something that is taught by religion which may or may not have anything to do with you. You have been told that there is no absolute truth about these things and no one should try to tell you what is right and wrong. The truth? Until very recently, everyone in the Western world knew what moral knowledge was and where it found its roots, including those who rejected that knowledge. Those principles had guided Western civilization for centuries and gave us an unprecedented way of life. Yes, the West has had its failures. And every one of them can be traced to the disregard of those values that everyone in their better moments knew were true. Yet today we are in the process of throwing them out. And everywhere around us we hear this talked about as an enlightened process. But we are already reaping the consequences of rejecting what can truly be known about human morality. And we have only seen the beginning.

Christianity: What most of you know of Christianity has come to you from comedians, charlatans, or those who hate anything religious at all. What makes it worse is that these parodies of the Christian faith are presented in a social vacuum where religion has been given no place, and in the wake of a Western Christian church that has largely lost its way. So you have probably never seen the real thing or have anything to compare your opinions to. It was not always this way. Up until fifty years ago, almost all historians acknowledged the tremendous role that Christianity played in shaping the modern world, and especially its role in establishing free societies. And if one were to dig deeper still, you would find a vast array of lives that have been totally transformed from terrible circumstances, from vile life-styles, and from nearly every form of dreadful existence, by the power and love of the Christian God. But this has all been hidden from view since before you were born – partly on account of the failure of many Christians in recent generations to develop an authentic relationship with God, and partly on account of those who could not stand Christianity and made it a point to eject it from the public mind. So most of what you think about Christianity is nothing more than lies you have been led to believe.

Freedom From Religion: You have been told over and over that religion has no place in the public sphere, that religious ideas must not be allowed to voice their opinions in places of government. Actually, the question of whether religion should have any say in the general public has been a matter of debate for a long time. No one probably ever bothered to tell you about the 1864 court case in which a public school in Pennsylvania was taken to court because it had stopped using the Bible in its curriculum (which had always been required reading up to that point). The court’s ruling? Decisions of what is taught in the public school should be left to the local school board. So if they wished to stop teaching the Bible, they could do so. However, they would no longer be eligible for Federal funding to assist them! That was the understanding of government and religion back when they could still remember how this country was founded. What began in the early days of our country as the freedom of religion has today become freedom from religion, which clearly has nothing to do with the meaning of religious freedom that was laid down in the constitution. Everyone back then knew that moral knowledge was absolutely necessary for a free society to survive. But you have been lied to about all of that.

Government: You have been told over and over that our best hope for the future will come from electing the right people, passing the right laws, and making people do the right things. This will never happen. The truth is you no longer are being taught what at one time was well known: that given enough time government has always, in every country and in every period of history, always taken from people their lives and dreams. That is why our founding fathers tried to create a government that would not grow too big. But we found a way to undo their limitations, and that will be the undoing of our country, not its salvation. By its very nature government has a monopoly on the use of force in order to maintain order and peace. So it would only follow that we should be very careful what else we give them, because that could lead to a tyrannical government. So what have we given them in the last thirty years? A blank check. You have been told that is our best hope. I tell you it will become our worst nightmare before it is over. Witness the financial meltdown of 2008-2009. You were told it was because government did not monitor the private sector well enough. The truth is that it was the government that changed the rules of the game, causing the cascading collapse of the system that had been in place for many years. They then pointed the finger at banks and other private companies and took the opportunity to gain even more control over our lives. The idea that more government will make your life better is terrible lie.

Sexuality: You have been lied to in almost every way in regard to sexuality. Sexual power is revered today as if it were the most important aspect of one’s personal value. Every girl wants to be called a hottie, and every guy wants to date one. “Hooking up” is now a recreational pastime that kids do for fun. A virgin who is past a certain age is someone to laugh at because it means they are naive and immature. Up until about 1960, this was not so. Everyone knew that sexuality was supposed to be a matter of self-control and that promiscuity was a vice not an achievement. Overtly sexual dress was known to be an inappropriate public display of loose morals. You have been told from before you knew how to tell the difference, that it’s “hot.” What you have not been told is that promiscuity has a cost. You have been told over and over that there actually is such a thing as “safe” sex for those who want to play. But there is no such thing. And nearly everything you feel today about sexuality has been twisted by lies.

Happiness: You have been told not only that you have a right to happiness, but that it is achievable by fairly direct means. All you have to do is want it and go after it, pursuing it at every opportunity. But it’s all lies. Happiness is a byproduct of a life well-lived and a great many factors that are out of your control. Going after it directly will not only disappoint you greatly, but may even kill you. A far more achievable goal is contentment. But no one will tell you that, because it doesn’t sell too well. What’s more, the whole “me/my” orientation that you have been seduced by is the surest way to make you into a miserable person by the time you retire.

What this all means

We could go on, but the list is almost endless. You have been lied to about nearly everything that matters, and trained to think in ways that without a doubt will eventually fail you. I’m sorry. But that is indeed the case. I wish I could offer you more hope, but the resources we need in order to stop this terrible loss of life-giving knowledge are rapidly being destroyed by the misuse of language, the pressures of modern culture, and the twisted values of those who have shaped our institutions of higher learning for the last fifty years or so.

There is but one hope, one that you will probably not believe when I tell you. So let me ask one thing of you. For just a moment, for the sake of argument, pretend that you have discovered the Matrix of the world you live in, and that the only thing you know for sure is that you have been lied to about everything. Then let me suggest that there is a real source of knowledge that you can have. That once you begin to access it, in the ways that it was meant to be accessed, ways you have never been told about before, then you will know by the clarity it contains and the freshness of life it breathes into your soul, that you have indeed found the truth. You can only know this truth by believing it and taking part in the manner of life it portrays. Any attempt to assess its value from where you now stand would be as futile as a blind person trying to make a choice between two shades of purple.

With that said, let me add one more caveat. What I am about to suggest to you, you have heard of in name before, but in name only. Almost everything else you have heard about this has been twisted and distorted so badly that it bears little to no resemblance to the original truth. So do not judge it by what you have heard before. Consider that like everything else, the truth about the Truth has been hidden from you in every conceivable manner. So you must consider it anew, like one freshly born, without prejudice or previous conviction about that matter.

What you need to know, what everyone has tried to hide from you, is that the person of Jesus Christ really did live here on this planet and bring to humankind a way of life that brings together truth and joy and love and peace in ways that nothing else can begin to match. And what makes all of this possible is the relationship that he offers us today with himself. When we fully believe that he is our only hope and ask him to save us from this pervasive darkness we all live in, he will come into our life and begin to transform our hearts and minds so that we can see the world more and more as he sees it. In so doing, we will be freed from the Matrix and find truth that will satisfy our souls. Bear in mind that I am not speaking about going to a boring church service and acting out religious behavior. I am talking about getting to know God, one-on-one, and having conversations with Him about our life.

There is much about this life that I cannot go into here. But let me say one thing. The key to this changed life that you need to know about more than anything, is this: We know far less about life than we think we do, and only God can mentor us in our day-to-day existence or heal our past wounds. And He accomplishes these things primarily by directly speaking into our hearts what He wants us to know. When we learn how to listen to His voice and engage with Him for all of our needs, He shows us the truth about life and gives us the kind of heart we need to live that life.

As The Lied-To Generation, you have been, above all, robbed of this most-important life-giving truth, that God is here and He wants to have a real relationship with you. This is the Red Pill. If you will take it, receive it, and begin to seek out those who know what this means, you will find a life you never thought possible. My hope for you is that you will let Him show you what you do not now know.